


dead mans party

by Impernia



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: art and teddy got married for tax benefits but this isnt about that, memorials for the dead, reference to the Dead Garages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-19 00:07:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29990895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Impernia/pseuds/Impernia
Summary: Arturo wouldn't say he's the best at spraypainting. He's not sure he'd even go as far as claiming to be good at it, some days. But the siesta hasn't shown any sign of stopping any time soon, and there's no end of blank walls he can practice on. His fingers itch.Arturo Huerta repaints the shrines of the dead, and then he paints the dead too whilst he's at it.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 9





	dead mans party

Arturo wouldn't say he's the best at spraypainting. He's not sure he'd even go as far as claiming to be good at it, some days. But the siesta hasn't shown any sign of stopping any time soon, and there's no end of blank walls he can practice on. 

He starts with the shrines. Nobody really calls them shrines - they're just a bunch of repurposed vending machines, after all - but everybody knows what they actually are. One per player, each styled and stocked with things relevant to them. He has genuinely no idea who fills these things (Who made the call on what to stock Tianas with?). They need retouching and updating over time, even if he can't quite find the ones for Soph or Mike anymore. He wraps Luis' in arrows pointing up, and tags a crow onto Betsys, and inevitably ends up buying more band-aids from Tots. They'd be fine without him, he knows. But it's something to do. It's a something _he_ can do.

He tends to the shrines for the dead as well, though they're a lot less active. Five vending machines, all stood together. They're not put anywhere out of the way, but they're also not exactly in the main hallway or rooms through the place. It makes it easier, almost. Quieter, certainly. There's nothing new to add here for them, but he can still keep the paint fresh and the lines clean at least. It feels right to do it, but it doesn't feel like enough. He's got an idea, though. More than that, he's got photos. He's got photocopied copies of the photos just in case, and the shape of five faces burned into his memory, and fingers that ache to do more than nothing. 

Shaq is first. Shaquille's almost the easiest, in a way. They'd been so much larger than life at times, even when they weren't playing a front for their viewers. Arturo hadn't understood that for a long time. But they'd laughed and smiled, and made jokes that he'd never gotten but found himself laughing at anyway, and the colours he paints come out so bright it's impossible to ignore. Their grin is still infectious. It wasn't what he'd been originally going for, but...Yeah. Yeah. He can work with bright. He keeps working until it's done, a head and shoulders shot of somebody he knew briefly years ago. He thinks he's used more paint than he brought with him. The Garage always has what you need somewhere, he supposes.

"Hey," Teddy says two days later. "You see the mural at the Big Garage?"

Arturo asks what he's talking about.

"Near the poster wall," Teddy says. "Someone went and painted like, a two story tall picture of Torres overnight."

Huh, Arturo says. He asks if anyone knows anything about who did it.

"They said nobody saw anything," Teddy says, kicking his leg gently. "And the CCTV nearby mysterously failed. Didn't get a thing. It looks good, Art, seriously. You should check it out."

He tells Teddy he'll think about it.

* * *

Bennett is next, filling the space outside one of the sidedoors in. But then they're there, one hand lifted to wave, and it feels lopsided. He can't figure out what to do there, and then he thinks of that moment when they'd looked around and found Tiana instead, and. Well. They'd never met each other in life, but maybe he can at least give them this instead.

Teddy doesn't say anything about how the garden fence is suddenly a wall of warm colours, yellows and orange and red blending and coiling over one another from where he'd been practicing. Fire's trickier than he thought it would be. It brings the garden to life a bit, though. Makes it feel warmer. If he relaxes his eyes and sits back at the counter where the living room meets the kitchen, the flames almost look alive.

(Two weeks later, he's watching Teddy brush out his hair and listening to him curse out the tangles as it keeps growing, and he remembers the burn scar in the shape of a large handprint that sits on his shoulder. Teddy doesn't say anything about the fence suddenly turning purple soon after, either, but some invisible tension bleeds out of his posture at the same time as it does.)

He rethinks what he's doing after that. She's not just - she wasn't just a filler for empty space. He can't do that to her. It's bad enough as it is: Fourty days of non-stop travel and playing Blaseball and nothing else wasn't exactly the best way of getting to know somebody. He remembers that she liked pineapple on pizza, and that she couldn't sit still, and that they'd been talking about getting her on some kind of percussion once they made it to the other side of the season. He has no idea what her favourite colour was, or if she had family, or...Anything, really. He knew her so briefly. He barely knew her at all. It'd been well over a decade and coming up on a second since then.

He finds a space of her own, in one of the tunnels that leads out to the fan seats. It's as tall as he thinks she'd been. He painted her in bright lines, the sort that look like they might just be caught in the wind, but she's ultimately nothing more than a sketch. Fourty days was never enough to know her in enough detail to give her anything more.

* * *

"Another mural went up," he says to Arturo a month later. "Somebody spotted it last night. Ron, this time. Over on the current north side, you know?"

Arturo thinks that's nice, and asks if they have any eggs.

"We're getting low on them. Add them to the shopping list, I'll go get some tomorrow whilst I'm at the shop."

He agrees to do that.

Ron always used to like the view looking out that way. Not too bright, sheltered from the weather. Ron had said a few times that it had some other properties he'd been interested in, but Arturo had never quite understood. There's blank space next to his painting, though, perfect if anybody should ever feel like painting something else there. Maybe he'll head down to Dallas in a few months, get some inspiration. See if anybody has any pictures of Stevenson, just in case. 

Arturo asks if they've got any fish left.

"I thought we had some left in the freezer?"

Arturo tells him they don't. They cooked it last week.

"Aw, shit," Teddy says. "You're right, I remember now. Add that to the list too for me?"

Arturo agress to do that, too. 

* * *

The siesta continues. He and Teddy file another tax return together. The numbers don't quite work out, but it's accepted anyway. Arturo remembers the fact that the notation of "Triple Threat" is still sat against his name on the database somewhere and decides not to think about it anymore. Teddy's hair is still growing, and it's getting long now. It's down past his lower back, almost to his knees at this point. It's almost a little surprising how well it's going, considering the fact the last time he ever cut it was back at the end of season 8. It looks good like that for him, Arturo thinks. He looks barely a day over thirty. Teddy's looked barely a day over thirty for the last fifteen years. He can only hope that when (if) they're called back to play again, he can convince him to just braid it and pin it back instead of cutting it short.

Time continues to drag on, each day the same length as the one before.

His pen scratches quietly against the paper of a notebook as he tries to get down the thoughts in his head. He has to keep checking the sketches with Teddy, and Teddy keeps forgetting the details whenever he looks away. It takes him too long to realise he's gotten the problem the wrong way around, and when he tries again it feels better. Not right, but it's a start. At last he has a sketch that won't slip from his husband's mind the second he's no longer focusing on it. Derrick was always going to be trickiest; The two of them a little bit too alike in that way. It's not that he was getting the details wrong, he was just getting them too correct. It feels like a bad joke. It feels, frankly, a little bit fucking cruel. But it's no crueller than anything else they've faced so far, and he can deal with that. He's been dealing with it.

(They never did find Derrick's van. It had had all of his things in it, pretty much. Arturo wonders if the Garage swallowed it up and put it somewhere safe. It's kinder than thinking about the alternatives, so he doesn't let himself.)

It's two stories tall, when he's done. Full body this time, too-long legs and everything. He had to bring a ladder. Funnily enough, nobody ever stopped him. It's still a work of frustration - the extra thumbs are apparently fine to keep, but his hairstyle wasn't. It's fine. He can figure something out. He just has to abstract instead of fudge, and it's a careful balancing act to try and create something that's still him without being too much of him. But the eyes are the same colour as the clouds over Seattle, and the saxiphone he's holding is the same as the one that sits carefully in the instrument room, and even if he's looking out to the side and away you can still tell he has a face. It's not his nose. His jawline didn't quite look like that. But everybody who looks at it can remember it, and they can remember Derrick.

Arturo thinks as he puts his equipment away. He thinks of Up, and the Trench, and of Justice. Of the rumours somebody had started, about some kind of plan to put a statue up somewhere, so nobody could forget what tarot card they'd been assigned with no explanation or meaning. Of how somebody suggested they make Jaylen into the face of it.

And he thinks of Shaq with a set of scales broken into drumsticks and a crooked grin, and Ron wearing a blindfold like a headband as he finetunes something for another M-Chord experiment. He thinks of Tiana sitting with a sword and a bat, and Bennett and juggling things that shouldn't be juggled, and of Derrick sitting there and just flipping everybody off instead. 

He thinks that somewhere in the Big Garage, there's going to be somewhere perfect to put them all, big and all standing together. He just needs to find it.


End file.
